Camping & Tramping with Roosevelt

The President is a born nature-lover, and he has what does not always go with this passion – remarkable powers of observation. He sees quickly and surely, not less so with the corporeal eye than with the mental. His exceptional vitality, his awareness all around, gives the clue to his powers of seeing. The chief qualification of a born observer is an alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, and this Roosevelt has in a preëminent degree.

You may know the true observer, not by the big things he sees, but by the little things; and then not by the things he sees with effort and premeditation, but by his effortless, unpremeditated seeing – the quick, spontaneous action of his mind in the presence of natural objects. Everybody sees the big things, and anybody can go out with note-book and opera-glass and make a dead set at the birds, or can go into the northern forests and interview guides and trappers and Indians, and stare in at the door of the "school of the woods." None of these things evince powers of observation; they only evince industry and intention. In fact, born observers are about as rare as born poets. Plenty of men can see straight and report straight what they see; but the men who see what others miss, who see quickly and surely, who have the detective eye, like Sherlock Holmes, who "get the drop," so to speak, on every object, who see minutely and who see whole, are rare indeed.

President Roosevelt comes as near fulfilling this ideal as any man I have known. His mind moves with wonderful celerity, and yet as an observer he is very cautious, jumps to no hasty conclusions.

He had written me, toward the end of May, that while at Pine Knot in Virginia he had seen a small flock of passenger pigeons. As I had been following up the reports of wild pigeons from various parts of our own state during the past two or three years, this statement of the President's made me prick up my ears. In my reply I said, "I hope you are sure about those pigeons," and I told him of my interest in the subject, and also how all reports of pigeons in the East had been discredited by a man in Michigan who was writing a book on the subject. This made him prick up his ears, and he replied that while he felt very certain he had seen a small band of the old wild pigeons, yet he might have been deceived; the eye sometimes plays one tricks. He said that in his old ranch days he and a cowboy companion thought one day that they had discovered a colony of black prairie dogs, thanks entirely to the peculiar angle at which the light struck them. He said that while he was President he did not want to make any statement, even about pigeons, for the truth of which he did not have good evidence. He would have the matter looked into by a friend at Pine Knot upon whom he could depend. He did so, and convinced himself and me also that he had really seen wild pigeons. I had the pleasure of telling him that in the same mail with his letter came the news to me of a large flock of wild pigeons having been seen near the Beaverkill in Sullivan County, New York. While he was verifying his observation I was in Sullivan County verifying this report. I saw and questioned persons who had seen the pigeons, and I came away fully convinced that a flock of probably a thousand birds had been seen there late in the afternoon of May 23. "You need have no doubt about it," said the most competent witness, an old farmer. "I lived here when the pigeons nested here in countless numbers forty years ago. I know pigeons as I know folks, and these were pigeons."

I mention this incident of the pigeons because I know that the fact that they have been lately seen in considerable numbers will be good news to a large number of readers.

The President's nature-love is deep and abiding. Not every bird student succeeds in making the birds a part of his life. Not till you have long and sympathetic intercourse with them, in fact, not till you have loved them for their own sake, do they enter into and become a part of your life. I could quote many passages from President Roosevelt's books which show how he has felt and loved the birds, and how discriminating his ear is with regard to their songs. Here is one: —

"The meadow-lark is a singer of a higher order [than the plains skylark], deserving to rank with the best. Its song has length, variety, power, and rich melody, and there is in it sometimes a cadence of wild sadness inexpressibly touching. Yet I cannot say that either song would appeal to others as it appeals to me; for to me it comes forever laden with a hundred memories and associations – with the sight of dim hills reddening in the dawn, with the breath of cool morning winds blowing across lonely plains, with the scent of flowers on the sunlit prairie, with the motion of fiery horses, with all the strong thrill of eager and buoyant life. I doubt if any man can judge dispassionately the bird-songs of his own country; he cannot disassociate them from the sights and sounds of the land that is so dear to him."

Here is another, touching upon some European song-birds as compared with some of our own: "No one can help liking the lark; it is such a brave, honest, cheery bird, and moreover its song is uttered in the air, and is very long-sustained. But it is by no means a musician of the first rank. The nightingale is a performer of a very different and far higher order; yet though it is indeed a notable and admirable singer, it is an exaggeration to call it unequaled. In melody, and above all in that finer, higher melody where the chords vibrate with the touch of eternal sorrow, it cannot rank with such singers as the wood-thrush and the hermit-thrush. The serene ethereal beauty of the hermit's song, rising and falling through the still evening, under the archways of hoary mountain forests that have endured from time everlasting; the golden, leisurely chiming of the wood-thrush, sounding on June afternoons, stanza by stanza, through the sun-flecked groves of tall hickories, oaks, and chestnuts; with these there is nothing in the nightingale's song to compare. But in volume and continuity, in tuneful, voluble, rapid outpouring and ardor, above all in skillful and intricate variation of theme, its song far surpasses that of either of the thrushes. In all these respects it is more just to compare it with the mocking-bird's, which, as a rule, likewise falls short precisely on those points where the songs of the two thrushes excel."

In his "Pastimes of an American Hunter" he says: "It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one's sense of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature. All hunters should be nature-lovers. It is to be hoped that the days of mere wasteful, boastful slaughter are past, and that from now on the hunter will stand foremost in working for the preservation and perpetuation of the wild life, whether big or little." Surely this man is the rarest kind of a sportsman.